The client/server computing environment continues to expand into web services, with the latest iteration of Internet supported programmatic access to information available from many different sources. An example is online publishing, which provides users with one-stop access to information from many varied sources. In online publishing, compiling this information from many different sources for synthesis as a single publication can be a big challenge.
Traditionally, this challenge has been addressed by human news editors who manually sift through news “stories” from many varied sources, and synthesize the stories for publication. More recently, newsfeeds have been deployed which implement simple filters to sort through the news stories and distribute stories matching the reader's preferences based on, for example, category (e.g., sports, headline news, entertainment), time (e.g., date of the story), and/or locality (e.g., having geographical relevance to the reader). While manual editorial and/or filter-assisted newsfeeds can help ensure relevancy of the information provided to the reader, these techniques do not scale well for a large, diverse readership.